Many of today's markets like financial, legal, military, education, entertainment and medical are all seeing their data grow exponentially. The market has coined the term “big data” to explain the rise of large databases and the growing amount of data being driven by every industry. The growing trend to maintain large amounts of structured and unstructured data is largely led by growing Governmental regulations and compliances. These factors are leading to the explosive growth of the cloud and data storage technologies.
One of the most common words used in the world of big data is the cloud. The cloud is coined term that refers to a large data “warehouse” that holds “offsite” a company's critical information using the Internet as a transport mechanism for the data. The cloud can be used in many different ways and by definition is the use of computing resources (hardware/software) that are delivered as a service over a network like the Internet. The cloud is about scale and very few companies have the ability to scale so the idea of “shared” infrastructure is a logical progression for most companies. It offloads costly IT in a model that becomes cost effective for any business. The challenge with any shared infrastructure and any “offsite” data system like the cloud is security. Can you really trust your data with someone else? How can you be sure they are not viewing the data? Who is liable for securing the data and how can you be sure best practices are being upheld? Security is especially a concern in an age where data theft is the invisible crime and exploding as we move to the cloud. The reality is that most data owners don't know they are hacked as hacking has been called the invisible crime.
Whether information is stored in a public cloud (off premise), private cloud (on premise), or a hybrid cloud (a combination of both), digital security is the biggest challenge for the cloud. And up until this point, it is very clear the cloud is hackable.
Today's data back-up systems use many different configurations, parameters and security technologies. A data back-up system typically refers to the archiving or copying of files from one location to a back-up location, allowing the user or company to restore the original data after a data-loss event. Most data back-up systems are a one-to-one relationship between a primary computer and a data back-up computer, server or cloud fabric. Due to the outbreak of data breaches, the traditional way of backing up data is not working and a new approach is needed.
However, the problem of data security and hacking is not limited to stored data but also includes general data transmissions on both public networks and private networks.